Review: Project Japan: Metabolism Talks … by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist; Kayoko Ota and James Westcott, eds.; Metaborisumu nekusasu by Hajime Yatsuka; Metabolism: The City of the Future; Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan by Mori Art Museum

Abstract

Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist; Kayoko Ota and James Westcott, eds. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks … Cologne: Taschen GmbH, 2011, 720 pp. US$59.99, ISBN 9783836525084 (English) Hajime Yatsuka Metaborisumu nekusasu Tokyo: Ohmsha, 2011, 466 pp., 170 b/w illus. ¥6,300, ISBN 9784274210112 (Japanese) Mori Art Museum Metabolism: The City of the Future; Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-Day Japan Tokyo: Mori Art Museum and Shinkenchiku-Sha Co. Ltd., 2011, 336 pp., 269 color and 319 b/w and sepia illus. Japanese ed. ¥4,800, English ed. ¥6,300, ISBN 9784786902345 (Japanese), 9784904700259 (English) Three recent books on Japan’s mid-twentieth-century Metabolist movement demonstrate how differing source materials yield new insights into important architectural moments. That the authors were able to develop new perspectives regarding one of the first truly media-aware architectural movements—concerning practitioners who have, over the past half century, reaped major international awards and published numerous books on their work and thinking—shows what can be revealed by moving beyond disciplinary conventions. Rem Koolhaas spearheaded a multilingual team of researchers, interviewers, and photographers who produced the most fascinating of these three texts, a book that he explicitly and repeatedly argues should not be considered an architectural history. Instead, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks … is presented as an oral history. Drawing on his early years as a journalist, Koolhaas, with Hans Ulrich Obrist, traveled to Japan in 2005 and 2008 to sound out Metabolism’s surviving protagonists on their recollection of Japan’s heady postwar era. The resulting 720-page book features nine of these interviews laced with insightful commentary and sidebar quotes from others such as Charles Jencks, Hajime Yatsuka, Hiroshi Hara, and Toyo Ito.1 These comprise roughly a third of the text and are interspersed with essays and a wealth of graphic material: historical photographs and architectural drawings never before published in English; slick timelines, maps, and infographics designed for the book, allowing for rapid appreciation of denser points; and tiny, often illegible reprints of newspaper articles, government reports, and men’s and women’s style magazines, even a page from the Japanese-language Playboy . Metabolists Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Kenji (a.k.a. Genji) Ekuan have the strongest presence in these interviews, but the book also includes conversations with the editor of the 1960 Metabolist manifesto Noboru Kawazoe; “shadow Metabolist” Arata Isozaki; mentor Atsushi Shimokobe (who would emerge as a powerful bureaucrat in Japan’s central …